He was now into his second hour of looking for whomever had awarded Carmody the shipyard training contract and he seemed no closer to finding this person than when he started. If he’d owned an aircraft carrier, he would have picked a fight with the navy. He had been told by Carmody that Carmody’s contract was administered by someone who worked at NAVSEA— the Naval Sea Systems Command. NAVSEA was located in the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C. The Washington Navy Yard had once been a real shipyard but the repair facilities had been closed years ago and its current function was to provide office space for navy headquarters personnel and their minions. It took DeMarco half an hour to get past security after which he learned that NAVSEA was a gigantic bureaucracy consisting of hundreds of people working on all aspects of navy business: weapons, ship construction, overhauls, personnel, logistics, and on and on and on. The number of cogs in this bureaucratic juggernaut was endless, and the people in the various departments seemed to know nothing other than their own function.
